_ Title uses common words. For example, I have Google rank #3 on “Capture Leads from a Website”. I wish I had written it as “Get Leads from my website” or something with more common wording. I would have been competing with 22 million results vs. just 9 milliong for “Capture Leads…”, but I would have had more impressions. The only way to know, is to post another blog entry – this time using “Get Leads…” and see what happens. When I have occasion to do so, I will.
_ Frequency of target phrase or words.
_ The Importance of Blog Categories for SEO.
I regularly do some analysis on this blog’s top search phrases as reported on my Google Webmaster Tools “Top Search Queries” report. I look for patterns such as how much, if any, impact does the post title, post word count, frequency of search terms, outbound links, and other items have on the search result ranking. I’ll share this week’s spreadsheet analysis of this blog’s search results later in the week.
For now, I wanted to share a strange phrase that popped up on this blog’s “Top Search Queries” report. Result #6, with an average top position of 5 is “mild discomfort times now”. Today my site is returned as the #1 result out of 2.2 million for that strange and rather useless search phrase.
This search phrase really does me, and probably the searcher, little good. But hoping to learn more and more about optimizing for Google search, here is the thought process I went through for this result.
The phrase “mild discomfort times now” is no where in the posts that come up as the Google search result. So it is not a case of an exact phrase match pushing up to top results. Check that off the list.
The one blog entry where I talked about mild discomfort is in a review of the Microsoft Ergonomic keyboard that I have and love. The phrase “mild discomfort” appears only one time in the post. Here is the sentence: “Repetitive stress injuries caused from long and continuous rounds or working at the computer can result in damage ranging from mild discomfort to extreme damage requiring surgery.” That blog entry is 371 words long. The search phrase appears no times, the word “mild” appears once, and “discomfort” appears twice. The #1 search result ranking of this admitantly strange search phrase is not a result of a strong semantical match. Check that off the list.
Here’s the kicker. Synap Software blog is the top result (and the #2 subresult), but it is not this blog entry that is returned. Instead it is the “category/productivity” page of my blog and the August 2006/month page of my blog.
In other words, the article that has the keywords in it does not rank while the aggregated category and monthly archive containing the article does.
Anyone know why? Is it worth trying to understand why? Or is this such an anomalous phrase that it presents little useful analytic value?
Synap Software, LLC 